


Eventuality

by nihilegi



Series: a study in inevitability [3]
Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 20:47:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20895866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nihilegi/pseuds/nihilegi
Summary: On March 15th,The Goldfinchwill be removed from the gallery to undergo necessary conservation efforts. It will be displayed again at an indeterminate time in the future. Thank you for your understanding.





	Eventuality

_Announcement regarding _The Goldfinch_, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654 – following a tragic terrorist attack at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, _The Goldfinch_ vanished and was presumed destroyed. Despite this assumption, no remains of the painting were ever salvaged. Ten years later, the painting was recovered in Frankfurt, Germany and was displayed in Rijksmuseum soon after. Due to the miraculous nature of its recovery as well as a great public demand for its display, few conservation efforts were undergone at the time._

_On March 15th, _The Goldfinch_ will be removed from the gallery to undergo these necessary conservation efforts. It will be displayed again at an indeterminate time in the future. Thank you for your understanding. _

The message was posted in both English and Dutch on the glass display case housing my painting. Ever since its return to the public eye, the Goldfinch had become one of the most popular exhibits at Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. There it had remained for the past fifteen years, but now they were taking it away. I couldn’t parse what this made me feel – largely, I was numb. 

My reunion with the painting had always seemed inevitable to me. I had to see it, didn’t I? Even though the quiet of museums still made me panic, and even though I adamantly didn’t trust a single person within the walls of the building, I’d come regardless. As soon as I saw the announcement regarding the restoration effort in our local newspaper – Hobie had innocently left it open on the kitchen table – I’d booked a ticket to the Netherlands. How could I not? For all I knew, I’d be dead the next time the painting was publicly displayed.

_Morbid, Theo_, I thought to myself. I’d been in a very morbid frame of mind since I was reminded that my painting was in someone else’s (potentially incapable) hands now.

Much like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, the Goldfinch was now displayed in a protective glass case. The crowd of people surrounding me shuffled around the painting, everyone inching closer when the front row of the crowd decided they’d had their fill. Inch by inch, I moved closer towards my soul.

And then I reached the front of the crowd. The tourists on either side of me looked at the painting, exchanged a few words in English about the miracle of its recovery, and went on their way. Some continued into the depths of Rijksmuseum, babbling excitedly about what they’d see next. Others moved towards the exit – the Goldfinch being the last thing on their list, the grand finale of their museum visit. If I were a normal person, a normal tourist, I wasn’t sure which camp I’d belong in. 

Though, dare I say, if I were a normal person, I probably wouldn’t pay the painting much attention at all.

“Sir?” Said the security guard stationed next to the painting, in an exhausted, customer-service voice I was very familiar with. (Though, most of the time, I was the one using that tone.)

“Hm?” I was jerked back into reality, aware of how insane I must have looked, scanning the painting to ensure it was still as I remembered it.

“Move along, please. Everyone here wants to see the Goldfinch,” the man told me, though his eyes were already flickering past me to focus on the next row of people. I nodded tightly, glancing at the painting once more in an attempt to absorb its essence so that I could carry it in me until we were reunited once again – the chain, the bird, the perch… it was simultaneously just as I remembered it and bitterly foreign to me. 

As I shuffled out of the way, not allowing myself a single backwards glance, I reflected on the irony of the Goldfinch being trapped behind a wall of glass. Not only was the little bird – “the _ptitsa,_” as Boris always called it – imprisoned by that tiny chain, but now it was entombed behind the glass as well. The painting didn’t belong there – it needed to be seen in the sun, not under the harsh spotlights of the Rijksmuseum. Much like myself, a piece of the painting would always belong in Las Vegas, where it was loved in the right way. 

Though who was I to decide such a thing? I quickly realized that coming to Amsterdam had been a terrible mistake. Christ, what was I thinking? Was I really foolish enough to believe that the painting would remember me?

I moved out of the gallery, collapsing heavily onto a bench up against the wall by the bathrooms. I could still see my Goldfinch from where I sat, just barely, though my attention was more focused on the people milling about. I wondered if any of them saw what I did. I wondered if anyone loved the painting like I had.

I stared blankly until someone stepped between myself and the painting, blocking it from my view.

“Oh,” I said softly. 

“I, um, hoped I would find you here,” Boris said. “I saw the announcement, knew this was the last day the painting was on display. Some luck, no?”

He looked different than the last time I’d seen him. He was older, more mature and refined. There was a hint of gray in the curls by his temples, and the smile lines by his eyes were permanently etched into his features. Unlike the last few times I’d seen him, he wasn’t wearing a heavy, black coat. He was dressed-down in his smart (likely designer) jeans and a crisp white t-shirt. It was the kind of outfit that looked casual from afar, but upon further inspection one could tell it was quite expensive. 

When I didn’t say anything more, Boris continued to ramble nervously. “Don’t worry, my being here is no great romantic gesture. I live nearby now, outside of Amsterdam proper. Was not a long drive at all. No word of when the restoration will be done… I figured you would need to see it once more in case you never see it again.”

Still, I stared at him stupidly. Adulthood suited Boris – the last time I’d seen him, in the dead of winter in New York, he’d still been trapped in that odd place between teenager and adult where his body didn’t quite suit his mind. I hadn’t realized it until I saw him again in his late-thirties, but he was still so skittish and young back then. He was older now. We both were. 

Also unlike the last time I'd seen him, I couldn't find it in me to be angry with him. There was some emotion swirling in me, replacing the maddening numbness the painting had left me with, but it was not anger.

“Potter?” He said timidly, and the sound of my old nickname sent me reeling. My breath stuttered in my throat, coming out as a wheeze that I was terrified would become a sob.

I stood abruptly, glancing around the gallery in a cursory way before fisting the fabric of Boris’ t-shirt and dragging him into the men’s room. Though it was a multi-stalled bathroom, there was a lock on the main door, which I quickly utilized. I leaned down to check under the other stalls, but I already knew we were blessedly alone.

“Theo?” Boris said, still timid, still sounding not-quite-sure that I wasn’t going to kill him. The front of his t-shirt was wrinkled from where I’d grabbed him.

I tried to speak, but I didn’t know what to say. There were too many emotions whirling through my mind, and my chest physically hurt from the intensity of it all.

So, instead of saying anything at all, I moved towards Boris and grabbed him by the outside of his thighs, lifting him into the air. He gasped softly but appeared to catch on pretty quickly, wrapping his legs around my waist as I backed him up towards the countertop. I kissed every inch of his face that I could reach, tangling my fingers in his hair and tugging his curls free from their proper, gelled-down style. When I finally pulled away, both of us gasping, he looked loose and wild and years younger than he was. His cheeks were red and his chest was heaving. Based on my reflection in the mirror behind him, I didn’t look much different.

“I didn’t know if you were dead or alive,” I told him, pushing our foreheads together so our breaths mingled in the scant space between our lips.

“Same for me, though I think I had more cause to be worried! You are crazy, always on the verge of suicide. Anything could have happened to you. _You_ could have happened to you.” Boris tried to make the words sound like a joke, but the weight of them rang true. 

“Why haven’t I heard from you?” I demanded.

“Why haven’t I heard from you?!” He echoed, reeling back to glare at me accusatorially.

“I asked you first,” I reminded him, pulling him in to hug him tightly, one of my hands coming up to hold the back of his head. He kept his legs wrapped around my waist, enfolding me in a comforting, grounding full-body embrace. 

“Because it is too painful to see you and know that I will leave you, or you will leave me. We come into each other’s lives and leave again, making a mess of things every time, and then I think of you for years, and I miss you for years. Is too painful, so I let you go,” Boris said.

“Well, clearly you didn’t do a very good job of it."

“You are not so easy to get away from, Potter,” he muttered, releasing me and falling slack against the mirror.

“Hey, you’re the one that sought me out. I didn’t even know you were living here,” I said, grazing up and down the length of his denim-covered thigh with the side of my hand.

“Figured enough time has passed, and I really do like it here. Beautiful city!” He motioned to the greater Amsterdam area with a flourish of his hand, though it kind of appeared he was just complimenting the beauty of the Rijksmuseum’s men's room. 

“It is,” I agreed. There was an inexplicable lightness within me, the morbid longing usually omnipresent in the recesses of my soul having dispelled slightly. I’d thought it was a longing for the painting, and my lackluster reunion with the blood of my heart had plunged me into despair. But my bathroom rendezvous with Boris was causing me to reconsider everything.

“Come over. Come see my home,” said Boris. He left no room for argument, and I didn’t intend to argue.

“Okay.”

I backed away from Boris, allowing him to clamor off the sink’s counter gracelessly. His right hand floated aimlessly for a moment before it settled at his side, and my heart stuttered as I realized he was about to take my hand. If I were a bolder man, I would have leaned forward and grabbed him. As it were, I shoved both hands in my pockets and trailed behind him as we left the bathroom, and it reminded me so vividly of all the times I’d trailed behind him blindly in Vegas. I adamantly avoided making eye contact with the men lined up outside, all of them eyeing us with an expression that seemed to say, “aren’t the two of you too old for this?”

The drive back to Boris’ house was indeed short – we were in the car for only twenty or so minutes. I wanted to ask about Gyuri, to inquire how, exactly, Boris was behind the wheel legally, but I held my tongue. Asking him would cause him to open up, and I was terrified of getting any closer to him than I already was. It would make our inevitable separation that much more difficult. 

But I shoved all thoughts of leaving him out of my mind. If I was only going to get him once every fifteen years now, I wasn’t going to spoil our brief encounters with my own melancholia. We’d inevitably part ways again, but while we were together, I could pretend he was entirely mine. 

“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked, as he pulled up to a small house, right outside of urban Amsterdam.

“No. Are you?” He asked, carefully keeping his gaze straight-ahead.

“Also no.” With that, we both exited the car and crossed Boris’ carefully-manicured lawn.

“Did you do this yourself?” I asked doubtfully. 

“Hm? Oh, the gardening? No, I hire someone. For my work, I delegate more than anything else these days, so I am home a lot. It is nice to live somewhere beautiful, no?”

He flashed me a dizzying, stunning smile over his shoulder, and my heart sank as I realized I was not only in love with the boy Boris was, but with the man he had become. My infatuation with him had surpassed the codependency we shared as children, transforming into something mature, something lasting and real. I'd never be able to get away from him, now. He'd always be a part of me. I suffocated this line of thought immediately: I was not willing to ruin this encounter with something so stupid.

Boris unlocked the front door and led me inside – the house was less sparsely decorated than his home in Antwerp had been. I guess it made sense, considering he spent far more of his time here than he ever did there. The house was all dark wood and high windows, the kind of place the local children probably thought was haunted. It was warm and homey, though. The entire place smelled faintly of coffee and wood smoke, and there were stacks of books – old books, new books, tattered manuscripts without a cover – on every flat surface.

“Sorry, didn’t clean much,” he told me, sounding genuinely embarrassed. “I never thought you’d actually, you know…” 

“Be there?” I asked him. He nodded, shrugging helplessly, before he continued down the hall.

His house was small, but that made it all the more homey. Off the main foyer we passed through the kitchen, and then he led me down a hallway to where I knew his bedroom would be. Somehow, we always ended up like this.

“You have a lovely home,” I said. His room was exactly like the rest of the house – dark and warm and cluttered – with the addition of the faint smell of marijuana. I knew it didn’t really mean much, but the fact I didn’t see any drug paraphernalia other than weed comforted me. Was there any chance we’d both stayed sober, all these years?

Boris backed me up against the door of his room, looking up at me through his lashes. “Stop with the small talk,” he said.

“Oh?” 

“Stop with the small talk and pick me up again.”

I did as he asked without hesitation, looping his legs around my waist once more. He got that same, taken-aback look in his eyes that he had in the bathroom earlier, though this time he’d fully been expecting it. I wasn’t particularly strong, but Boris wasn’t particularly heavy. He wrapped himself around me like a python, squeezing every thought out of my mind that wasn’t about him. To be fair, there hadn’t been many thoughts that weren’t about him in the first place. 

Walking us both over to his bed, I dropped us into the sheets that smelled intoxicatingly of him. Every other time we’d ended up like this, it had been in my bedroom. There was something so cloyingly, so _aching_ about us being in his space, this time. He couldn’t leave like he had in New York, where would he go? I knew this ultimately meant I’d have to be the one to run off when it was time, but with him in my arms, thoughts like that were too painful. 

I kissed him, then, pouring my heart and soul into it. His hands came up between our bodies and he grappled with my suit jacket, pushing it off my shoulders and then down my arms. Then he got to work unfastening my shirt, pausing to trace over the newly exposed skin every time he undid a button. I pulled back, interrupting his pattern to pull his t-shirt over his head, falling into him as I kissed and licked every inch of his torso, drifting lower and lower.

He was gasping for air by the time I reached the waistband of his jeans, and I slowly unfastened them, taking my time for once in my life. Slowly, worshipfully – like I was in a divine trance – I kissed the birthmark on his hip. 

And then Boris was pushing me away from him, scurrying to the other side of the bed before I could process what was happening. He sat facing away from me, his head in his hands, and it took me longer than it should have to realize he was crying. The sobs were heavy, wracking his body as wave after wave of grief washed over him, and I had no idea what to do. 

“Boris,” I murmured.

“Fuck, I’m _sorry_,” he said, his words coming out warbled. He still wouldn’t turn to look at me, and all I could do was stare at the lines of his back. His skin was pale, unblemished. He’d lost the skeletal quality of his youth, but I could still pick out the individual vertebrae of his spine.

“Don’t be fucking sorry. Tell me what’s wrong,” I urged him, keeping my distance for once in my life. After a few minutes, Boris seemed to get himself under some semblance of control. He turned to look at me, his nose running and his cheeks red and his eyelashes glittering with tears. It wasn’t a good look on him, but he was beautiful nonetheless. He was always beautiful.

“I thought I could do it, thought I could see you, but I can’t. Is too much. I’m thinking it will always be too much,” Boris said, half to me and half to himself. He laughed aloud, then, a grim watery sound that made my stomach drop, and he scrubbed at his nose with the back of his hand.

“I can go,” I offered, though I thought I’d rather die a bloody death than leave him alone like this.

“I know you can, and I know you will. Neither of us can ever stay. Is not how we _work_, is it?” He took a few deep, steadying breaths. I watched him with the full knowledge that just as I’d lost the painting, I was about to lose Boris as well. The mere thought of that was devastating, sending a wave of panic through my body that was twice as severe as the terror that consumed me when I was in crowded places.

I stumbled to my feet, shoving my shirt and jacket the rest of the way off, before I walked around to the other side of the bed where he was sitting, his feet hanging down towards the carpeted floor. He still had his shoes on, as did I, because it had seemed like such a minor detail to attend to when faced with the wonder of getting our hands on each other again.

For just a moment, I stood over him. I could have done to him what he did to me, raising his chin so he was forced to look at me. I could have kissed his forehead reverently, as he’d done in New York before dancing out of my life for an agonizing fifteen years. I could have left, and we would have called it, because we were never “meant to be.” Obviously. We weren’t capable of a stupid, romantic-comedy happy ending. Real people don’t get to be that kind of happy.

But I did none of those things. I dropped to my knees on his carpet and embraced him around his middle, his elbow bashing into my forehead painfully. It didn’t matter, though. All that mattered was that I could feel his stuttery inhales and exhales as I rested my cheek in the dip between his ribcage and hipbone. I kneeled there on the ground like I was praying to him.

“Boris…” I said.

“Say it. Tell me.” He knit a hand in my hair, a little too firm in his anticipation. I didn’t even register the pain.

“You already _know_.”

“Of course I already know. The point is that I already know. Tell me anyway.”

He pulled my hair, forcing me to look up at him. His eyes were still glimmering with unshed tears. He was worrying his bottom lip with his teeth, nearly hard enough to draw blood, and I knew we had the same fear – that, somehow, the secret I was about to tell him wasn’t the one he wanted to hear. This fear was almost enough to cow me into silence, like it had in Vegas, but I was older now. Older and braver. 

“I love you. Too much. I love you in a way that absolutely cripples me because I’m utterly useless when we’re apart. This ‘leaving each other until we’re forced back together again’ thing isn’t working for me anymore. What if I die before we meet again? Or you die? And all we have are these things we didn’t say to each other? I’m sick of implication, of living between the lines. I love you — since Vegas, since before I even met you. It’s always been you.”

A single tear trailed down his cheek, and I wasn’t that horrified to find I was crying as well. What was the point in bottling anything up, after I’d laid all my cards on the table like that? All my life, I’d kept everything inside of me for decency’s sake, and every time the world got to be too much to carry, Boris pulled it all out of me, holding me while I cried. _Sh, Potter. Is only me. Eta ya._

And it always _was_ him, _only_ him. And now he knew.

He released his grip on my hair, bringing his hand to cup my face instead. His thumb toyed with my quivering lower lip. 

“_Maya ptitsa_,” he whispered to me.

“Oh,” I said.

“Of _course_, Potter, how could you not know? I… for all these years, I wanted you to stay. Stay and don’t leave again. Even if we do not live here, we can stay together. I will take you to New York, to Russia or Ukraine. Wherever you want to be, I can be there with you.”

“Okay,” I told him, and this time I meant it. It was the easiest promise I’d ever made, and it felt like the world had finally been lifted off my shoulders. He visibly untensed, falling forward and collapsing on top of me, his fingers grappling on the bare skin of my back like he was trying to find purchase.

“I need you,” he told me.

“You have me."

“I know.”

He straightened up again before falling backwards on the mattress, atop the tangle of his bedsheets because of _course_ he didn’t make his bed in the morning. I stayed on the ground, taking my time to pull his shoes off, one by one, and then his socks as well. There was no need to rush anymore. 

After I’d tugged my own shoes off, admittedly more hastily, Boris pulled me up onto the bed, with the wiry strength and vivacity of a boy half his age. I’d loved that boy, and I loved this one too. Maybe I even loved this one more. 

I climbed up to him, bracketing Boris with my knees even though I was older now and it wasn’t as comfortable a position as it had been in our youth. I ignored the aching in my joints and kissed him, slowly seducing my way into his mouth until we were grinding against each other like teenagers, the kiss becoming sloppier and sloppier until we were merely exchanging gasps and groans.

He flipped me onto my back not long after, and I made the mistake of moaning in pleasure as the pressure on my knees was finally relieved. He grinned wickedly.

“You are so _old_ now, Potter!”

“Hey, you’re the one going gray before forty,” I reminded him.

“Oh, I know you like it. I am so distinguished now! You think it is sexy, I can tell.” Before I had the chance to protest any further, he squeezed the erection straining against my slacks briefly, before pulling back and reaching to dig through the drawer in his bedside table. When he emerged blushing, with lube and a condom in his hands, I nearly had a stroke. 

From there, it was… inevitable. It always had been inevitable. Boris wrestled his own pants and underwear off before doing the same with mine and then he straddled my hips, taking great care to open himself up (and no matter how many times I begged to do it for him, he continued to slap my hand away. “No, have to save _something_ for next time, hm? You can look forward to it.”)

He rolled the condom on me with shaking hands, because we both knew that this was entirely uncharted territory. Of course we’d never done this back in Vegas, for a litany of reason. This was _gay_ and we weren’t gay. Though, had we actually had lube on hand back then, part of me knew we’d probably have ended up here regardless.

I was glad we didn’t. The feeling of Boris once he was fully seated with me inside of him, the soft gasps, the wild look in his eyes with their blown pupils… this was a point of no return. If we’d done this back in Vegas, I’d never have been able to leave him. I waited patiently until he got used to me, swiveling his own hips as he relished in the fullness, and knew I’d never let him go again. The sex felt sacred, like we were consummating everything we’d ever meant to each other, and I loved him and hated him and craved him and understood him – every fucking emotion I’d ever felt towards Boris, I was feeling again, all at once. It was too overwhelming to deal with.

And I’d never understood that one Leonard Cohen song – “remember when I moved in you, the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was hallelujah” – until that moment.

I pressed gently on the birthmark on Boris’ hip, wishing we’d done this years and years ago even though I knew that would have been terribly self-destructive. Something of this magnitude was worth waiting for. He dug his nails into my chest, almost breaking the skin.

He started gasping out my name as I took him into my hand (“Potter, Potter, _Theo”_) and that was all it took. His face went blank as he came, his brows furrowed and his mouth open just slightly as he threw his head back. As beautiful and shameless as he’d always been. I held his hips hard enough to bruise, thrusting up into him once, twice more before I joined him, falling over the brink.

Afterwards he fell onto my chest, taking care to keep me inside of him for as long as possible. I traced patterns on his back – words in languages I didn’t know – as we both caught our breath again.

“I feel like that was a long time coming,” he whispered to me. I didn’t respond immediately, trying to quell the instant, overpowering urge to propose to him.

“I think you’re right.”

“You know, we really should have done this when new were younger. Back in Vegas? We could go again in twenty minutes. Now we are so old and so boring, practically on death’s door!” 

“Practically,” I mused. “You know I love you, right?”

“Yes, Potter. I know. I have always known. Want to go take a bath together and smoke a joint? The bathtub is huge.” 

Ultimately it didn’t matter what my answer to that invitation was, because in a flurry of movement Boris was twirling around the room – entirely unselfconscious in his nudity as he tied off my condom and threw it away before making his way into the bathroom. He was always a whirlwind of energy after sex. 

I listened to him turn on the faucet in the en suite, humming to himself some song I didn’t recognize, as I took a moment for myself. I waited for guilt or regret to wash over me, but it didn’t. I waited for the familiar feelings of inadequacy or sadness, but they, too, evaded me. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t feel cripplingly alone. The inherent melancholy in my soul was seeping from me, leaving things brighter and more focused.

“Potter, get in here!” Boris called. I was unable to stifle a grin as I sat up, because even if he hadn't said it in as many words, I knew he loved me too. 

And then I went to him.

* * *

“This one? Terrible. Who painted it?” Boris asked me, leaning in to stage-whisper. The teenage daughter of a middle-aged couple nearby shot us a look of shocked amusement.

“That’s a Rembrandt, Boris, and I think insulting him is illegal in this country,” I replied, looking at the teenager in an exasperated way. She smiled back, looking slightly less bored as she trailed behind her parents to the next room in the gallery. 

“The lighting is stupid, and there is far too much going on. _The Night Watch?_ What does that even mean? Isn’t that a character from that show you hate?”

“If you’re talking about _Game of Thrones_ then yes, kind of. However, I really doubt Rembrandt took any kind of inspiration from a television show filmed in the 2010s.” 

“You can’t know that for sure,” Boris said dismissively, already walking towards the next room in the gallery. With the way he was clutching my arm – like a Victorian lady, strolling with her lover through the countryside – I was forced to walk alongside him, leaving great works of art behind us as Boris continued to search for something that suited his specific, objectively-incorrect taste in artwork.

We’d decided to return to Rijksmuseum two days after we’d initially reunited within its walls. Something within me felt incomplete, like I hadn’t accomplished what I needed to here. Boris was always insufferable around art – he just didn’t see it like I did – but he’d insisted upon accompanying me. Hell, he’d even toned down his usual complaining.

The next room in the gallery was almost empty – unsurprising since one of the more famous paintings in the museum had just been removed from its walls. A few pieces of ancient pottery still remained in the gallery, but it was very clear something was missing. I dropped Boris’ arm, walking towards the empty glass case on the other side of the room. He hung back, feigning interest in the pottery to give me a moment alone. For this, I was appreciative.

The notice was still taped on the outside of the glass case, letting all potential museum-goers know exactly where the Goldfinch was, what was happening to it. The security guard from a few days ago was no longer there, obviously, so I was able to step around the velvet rope and for a moment, rest my forehead against the cool glass that used to house my painting. 

I didn’t exactly feel nothing, but what I did feel was so indescribable and distant that it was almost easier to pretend I couldn’t feel anything at all. The essence of my painting was still there, lingering within the glass case as it had within myself, as it had within Welty.

“Potter,” Boris said from behind me, placing a hand on my shoulder. His voice was soft and understanding, and I was all-at-once glad he’d come with me.

“Yeah?”

“I finally found a painting I like. May be better than your Goldfinch, even. Maybe next time you commit art theft, you could take this one?” He traced his hand down the length of my arm, and when he reached my wrist, he linked our pinkies together.

I drew away from the glass case, sparing one last glance at the bleak emptiness within it, before I turned to look at Boris. His hair was loose, curly and beautiful and soft, and he was looking at me in an open, loving way. I was unfamiliar with the warmth and the understanding in his gaze, but we didn’t have to hide anything from each other anymore. I knew I could tell him I needed a few more moments alone, and he’d leave me to it. But I didn’t want him to leave me.

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed, realigning our palms so that we were holding hands properly. “I won’t believe it until I see it.”

Boris started babbling excitedly about a painting of a swan, dragging me out of the gallery by my hand like I was an errant child. Right before we turned the corner, I glanced behind me to get one more look at the empty glass case, just in case the painting had miraculously returned. It hadn’t, and I didn’t allow myself to look back again.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope this makes up for the angst of parts prior! Don't worry, they live happily ever after.
> 
> also "maya ptitsa" literally means "my bird," but Boris uses ptitsa to refer to the Goldfinch throughout the book, so this is essentially Boris calling Theo his Goldfinch. There's a lot to unpack there!
> 
> love y'all, thanks for reading!
> 
> [my tumblr](http://www.acwrite.tumblr.com)


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